A compelling story of love and forgiveness, from the bestselling author of Invisible and The Book of Illusions.
Paul Auster is the best-selling author of Invisible, Man in the Dark, The Brooklyn Follies, The Book of Illusions, The New York Trilogy, among many other works. In 2006 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among his other honours are the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke and the Prix Medicis Etranger for Leviathan. He has also been short-listed for both the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (The Book of Illusions) and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (The Music of Chance). His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Miles Heller is an anomaly, a 28-year-old college dropout who has pared his life down to bare essentials, eschewing the ostentatious trappings of his generation and splurging only on books. Miles earns a living "trashing out" repossessed homes in south Florida, snapping disturbing photos of the detritus left behind by the newly homeless. When he falls for Pilar Sanchez, a precocious 17-year-old, Miles realizes that his day-to-day existence of few desires or needs is over. Anxious for Pilar to be of legal age to marry, he returns home to New York hoping to repair the seven-year rift with his family caused by the burden of guilt he has carried since an accident that killed his stepbrother. Miles begins to reinvent himself, squatting in an abandoned house in Brooklyn with a crew of intriguing characters: Alice, a doctoral candidate whose work at PEN frustrates her; Ellen, a lonely artist; and Bing, a brooding presence whose mood swings presage the incident that may ruin their future plans. Verdict The author deftly balances minute details that evoke New York City, post-financial meltdown, with marvelously drawn characters bruised but unbowed by life's vicissitudes; think Richard Russo or Anne Tyler. Auster has an impressive array of literary nominations to his credit (e.g., PEN/Faulkner, IMPAC Dublin, and Edgar), but this should be the novel that brings him a broader readership. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/10.]-Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Myers, FL Copyright 2010 Reed Business Information.
Auster's dry, gravelly voice has a gravitas all its own. He reads his novel about Miles Heller, hiding out from the authorities in the titular Brooklyn neighborhood, interspersed with discursions on film and baseball, fate and chance. While Auster should intuitively knows the rhythms of his own work, his reading can be oddly choppy; he occasionally comes down too hard on the wrong word. Still his voice is enough to convey a sense of the writer. One almost feels that Auster is himself an Auster character, blowing smoke rings in an empty room while pondering America's mysteries and minutiae. A Holt hardcover. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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